Mechanics National Bank (Philadelphia)

The following January, they adopted a set of bylaws that required all directors to be mechanics currently working at their trades and prohibited mercantile investments like ships.

There wasn't enough room in the building for everyone who wanted to buy stock – according to one report, a man lost his hat and wig trying to climb in a window – and nearly 700 people were turned away.

For its first twenty years, the "Banking House" was a three-story brick building formerly occupied by a hat and bonnet maker (the vault was an addition in the back yard) and by 1833, it had become completely inadequate for its purpose.

Despite some hasty repairs, the bank outgrew the building within two years, temporarily expanded into the house next door and began to buy land on the opposite side of Third Street.

The heavier square pilasters that support the corners of the portico instead of round columns and the especially fine stone carving (by his longtime partner John Struthers) help to keep the building from being overwhelmed by its bulkier neighbors.

Unfortunately, their satisfaction with Strickland's architecture didn't extend to his business practices: he had sent them a bill for $3,920 in additional expenses resulting from changes to the corners of the portico and the arrangement of the vault and offices.

They claimed not to have authorized most of them and refused to pay the additional money, perhaps in part because the charter limited expenditures on land and buildings for the banking house to $50,000.

The aids to be derived from the existing Banks cannot but be too limited and too casual to answer fully all the good purposes to which, under special modifications, such Establishments may be made conducive.

Conducted as they generally are by men, tho' liberal and enlightened, yet of commercial rather than mechanical pursuits, their information cannot but be imperfect as to the character and credit of persons engaged in occupations entirely different from their own.

Two years later, it bought back most of its stock, and on February 16, 1903, the fifteen remaining shareholders voted to dissolve the corporation and transfer its business to Girard National Bank.

After twenty-five years as the legendary Club Revival and several other bars including an ill-fated Coyote Ugly and Foggy Goggles, the building has seen a rebirth.

The current tenants have chosen the historically pertinent name, National Mechanics, to make an upscale bar and restaurant where the décor and demeanor tip their respective hats to the building's original incarnation.

John Aitken (subscriber), Music publisher and composer Most of the founders of the Mechanics' Bank were artisans who had served traditional apprenticeships but whose later paths set them apart from their peers.

As chairman of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’ Committee on Instruction, Coates was instrumental in appointing Eakins as director and supported reforms like teaching anatomy from nude models instead of plaster casts.

A generation later, the antiquarian Abraham Ritter recalled that "Mr Flintham was a very active and intelligent man, whose mechanical trade could not confine his genius; and passing from the cooper-shop to the counting-house, entered more extensively in the shipping business, but alas, in fine, not to profit."

His father, Frederick Gaul, had come to the city from Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany in 1804 and owned the former Robert Hare brewery which had made George Washington's favorite porter.

One of Hunt's best-selling authors was Parson Mason Weems, the fanciful biographer who invented the story of George Washington chopping down his father's cherry tree.

In 1821, the University of Pennsylvania announced that its medical school would establish a pharmacy program, a move that local pharmacists saw as an attempt by physicians to take over their profession.

At the Centennial Exposition in 1876, they were awarded a medal "for the products exhibited coming from the distillation of wood, for metallic salts and especially for the careful manufacture of sulphate of alumina and alum".

Born in Philadelphia, he matriculated from what is now Princeton University in 1845 and traveled extensively in Europe and the America's studying Romany, witch and Native American cultures.

His works are still read today by Wicca's and others interested in folk history for their fine lyrical content and first-hand sources of antiquated incantations and spells.